MailChimp in your Gmail with Rapportive

It’s an incredibly powerful Gmail plugin that turns your inbox into a mini social CRM.

For example, let’s say I work for "The Big Agency" and I’m reading a message from a very important client (her name’s Amanda) inside my Gmail inbox. With Rapportive installed, I can click or hover my mouse over her name, and the Rapportive panel displays information about Amanda from the social graph, like this…

Rapportive gives me:

Her photo (pulled from twitter)

a brief bio

her recent tweets

links to her profiles on other social networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Plancast, and more.

Cool, huh?

As you can see, she’s the Head of Community at some company called "mailchimp" (heh. that’s a funny name for a company).

Hmm, looking at her latest tweets, I can see that she frequents the dribbble website (do I detect a little designerd in Amanda?), and she’s also thinking about getting an Android smartphone. If she were my client, I might reply to her tweet and send her this video review from an Engadget staffer. If I didn’t have that kind of rapport with her yet, I’d probably just get up to speed on Android phones, because the next time we meet, I could bring it up in conversation: "Whoah, is that the new X? How’re you liking it so far?" And if I had an extremely high level of rapport with her (I’m talking like — off the charts), I’d send her this very NSFW but hilarious video link about the iPhone4.

It showcases some new free guide our agency just published. Since it’s about social media, maybe Amanda would be interested.

With the MailChimp Raplet installed, the next time I email Amanda from Gmail (say, to give her an update on her project), some really handy MailChimp information will appear inside the Rapportive panel:

As you can see above, it contains her latest MailChimp activity:

It tells me if Amanda is subscribed to any of my lists (indeed she is)

Getting the MailChimp raplet installed to Gmail

Then, within Gmail, look for the Rapportive link at the top of the screen:

Now stare at that image a while, and burn it into the long term memory portion of your brain. You’ll be going back to that little "r" Rapportive link a lot. Notice that this is where you log in to Rapportive. Occasionally, you’ll need to log back in there (if you get logged out). It’s also where you add raplets to Rapportive.

Click on "add/remove raplets" then on the next screen, add the MailChimp raplet:

Bam. You just made Gmail even more awesome.

While you were there, did you notice the Raplets for Batchbook, and Pearl CRM? They integrate with MailChimp too. So while I’m in Gmail, getting all this wonderful data from social networks and from MailChimp, I can also click into my Batchbook Raplet and see if my teammates might’ve made any recent comments about Amanda:

Oh crud. I better not mention that Android phone afterall. And I *definitely* better not send her that iPhone video. Hmm, looks like the Batchbook raplet actually lets you enter comments from inside Gmail.

So I can post a comment back into Batchbook, for all my teammates to see:

Depending on how that lunch with Amanda goes, I might try to work this video (iPhone vs. Blendtec) into my next email newsletter as sort of an inside joke. Wink wink.

Social Graph + Email Graph

The MailChimp Raplet uses Rapportive’s social graph data and blends it with MailChimp’s "email graph" to give you information you need to get to know your clients better.

+1 on the need for longer persistence of login. Make it an option, make it configurable, anything to help us out and not need to log in all the time. After all, what’s the WORST that could happen if we stay logged in all the time?

This isn’t so much about mailing lists being inside Gmail. Rapportive is a nice add-on to Gmail that lets you learn a little more about the people you’re talking to in Gmail. If one of those people also happens to be on your MailChimp list, the MailChimp raplet will give you some useful information. More of an ambient kind of thing.

I love this tool but I regularly have to log back in. I press on the login button which opens another tab to Mailchimp. I am already logged in there. Only when I reload my Google Apps window do I see the Mailchimp raplet information for the contact.

Please, please get this fixed. It is a great tool (much more useful than rapportive itself in my opinion) but a bit annoying with the login issues.

Same problem as the others: no matter how many times I login I can’t get MailChimp data to show in Gmail via Rapportive.

I spend quite awhile with the support team and they couldn’t solve my problem (multiple browsers, etc.) If anyone figures out how to make this work, I’d love to hear about it. It would be great for my job (publicity). I love how Batchbook works with Gmail through Rapportive.

It’s neat indeed. However, I’d love the possibility not only to read, but to add as well. I noticed some my clients aren’t on my list yet. I’d like to add them via Rapportive which puts Mailchimp into action by sending them a standard email (autoresponder) as an invite to subscribe to our newsletters.